Woodward's book: 5 telling moments

Bob Woodward’s new book will be required reading in Washington for the precise reason the New York Times review was critical: its “granular telling … its almost blow-by-blow chronicle” of deficit-reduction talks during President Barack Obama’s first term.

Whether or not his reporting fundamentally changes Washington’s understanding of these years – in particular, the debt-ceiling negotiations of 2011 – the book offers essential color on the characters behind those talks.

The problem came up time and again during the debt-ceiling talks: Conflicts involving aides, their bosses, and the question of who was negotiating with whom. One of Woodward’s examples comes during the April 9, 2011, continuing resolution talks.

“During the heated negotiations, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff, reported to David Krone, Reid’s [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s] chief of staff, that Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff, said there was a breakthrough.

“ ‘I talked to Daley,’ Jackson said. ‘He told me that you guys could get to at least $70 billion in cuts.’ It was much more than the White House had been proposing.

“Reid and Krone were surprised. Daley said his statement had been misinterpreted. But Krone and Jackson had developed a strong relationship, and Krone believed the speaker’s chief of staff over the White House chief of staff. So did Reid, who was outraged that Daley would insert himself in the negotiation.”

‘Joy of the game’

Lawrence Summers, the former director of the National Economic Council, is the subject of one of the character sketches Woodward uses to open some chapters. Obama “was not ideologically driven” and had an “excessive pragmatism,” Woodward has Summers telling people. That pragmatism left “the chief advocates from both the left and right perpetually unsatisfied.

“But the president was not satisfied either, Summers said. ‘Obama really doesn’t have the joy of the game.’”

Woodward describes Summers as frustrated with Obama’s approach to banking leaders – alternately portraying them as “fat-cat bankers” and “savvy businessmen” — and with the designation of senior adviser Valerie Jarrett as a liaison to the business community.

Media matters

Leaks and efforts to avoid them repeatedly factored into episodes Woodward recounted. One moment came on July 12, 2011, when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor reportedly criticized Obama for an apparent leak.

“Some of Cantor’s presentation on health care from the day before had shown up in Politico,” Woodward wrote. “ ‘Witness what happened last time we came in and brought paper, Mr. President,’ Cantor said. ‘Witness what’s going on. Totally inappropriate. It shouldn’t have happened.’” He continued.

“ ‘Completely agree,’ the president said. ‘Shouldn’t have happened. I will take responsibility for it. And if it happens again, we’ll have to kick out the staff.’”

Cigarettes, Nicorette

An already much-repeated anecdote from the book describes a meeting between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner where the speaker smoked a cigarette and the president chewed Nicorette gum. Boehner suggested the moment was emblematic of his “differences” with the president.

But Obama saw it as emblematic of their common ground, Woodward suggests elsewhere in the book.

“Boehner was a type he [Obama] knew well, he said. ‘He reminds me of people I worked with in Springfield, Illinois,’ he told his inner circle, referring to his eight years in the state legislature. ‘John Boehner is like a Republican state senator. He’s a golf-playing, cigarette-smoking, country-club Republican, who’s there to make deals. He is very familiar to me.’”

’ Our come-to-Jesus moment’

Woodward goes inside the Biden working group on debt reduction – talks between the White House and congressional leaders that took place in May and June 2011 – in three chapters that are sourced “primarily from background interviews,” “firsthand sources” and “contemporaneous notes” by participants, without citations of other media reports, which appear in most of the other 37 chapters.

In the group’s sixth meeting, “they kept coming back to the question of revenue, and the Republicans’ refusal to address it,” Woodward wrote.

“‘This is our come-to-Jesus moment,’ Biden said.

“ ‘Yeah,’ said Cantor, who is Jewish, ‘but I’m not very good on that point.’”